Tag Archives: science communicators

We all have heroes, people we look up to and whose achievements spur us on to do our own personal best. And, especially in this era where women are saying #metoo and finally being heard, we have probably all had the experience of finding out that one of our heroes has done some less than heroic things. This has come up a lot for me recently with the deaths of some very famous scientists and science fiction writers, men I greatly admired when I was a kid, who I’m now discovering were frequently awful to women (i.e., people like me).

I think this happens more than usual in science, a traditionally male-dominated field where a culture of elitism and privilege has been embedded for a long time. And it’s tempting to view things in black and white: either my hero is amazing for their achievements or they are garbage for their behaviour. We know in our personal lives that people are multi-faceted, yet we’re slow to allow public figures that same understanding. If a famous male scientist discovers lots of things, and is a great collaborator with other men but acts differently toward women, consciously or unconsciously, how are we meant to think about that?

As a physicist who loves to write, I’ve had to consider this before, because one of my early science heroes was Richard Feynman. Feynman was a brilliant theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate, and worked on the Manhattan project building the atomic bomb in my hometown of Los Alamos. He also wrote a series of very enjoyable popular science books, which were also quite personal and effortlessly engaging. A quote from an interview that immediately stuck with me:

Omni: As we came back to the office, you stopped to discuss a lecture on color vision you’ll be giving. That’s pretty far from fundamental physics, isn’t it? Wouldn’t a physiologist say you were ‘poaching’?

Feynman: Physiology? It has to be physiology? Look, give me a little time and I’ll give a lecture on anything in physiology. I’d be delighted to study it and find out all about it, because I can guarantee you it would be very interesting. I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

As someone who is omnivorous about knowledge, I found that quote resonated with me deeply. Science is fascinating because it shows us how the world works, how things which might appear separate are deeply connected, and the overlapping intricacies behind the everyday we take for granted. I now do my research on nanoscience, a strongly interdisciplinary field that draws from chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and plenty more beyond the physics that I got my degrees in. I admired Feynman for not letting other people dictate the questions he could ask, for being a physicist in what felt like a subversive and wide-ranging way. He was also famous for his sense of humour, his love of non-scientific things like playing bongos, and for generally not being as formal and rigid about anything as physicists tend to be.

The author having a Feynman bongo moment at the No-Ball Prizes. Photo by Ian Bowkett.

Of course, if you read Feynman’s books you’ll also find less inspiring stories, if you are a female scientist. He writes about doing his calculations in a Hooters, negging women in bars, and pretending to be an undergraduate to pick up grad students’ wives. This is less subversive, and more what we might generously call ‘of a time’. Feynman did plenty to promote the status of women in physics, encouraging his own sister to study it and eventually get a PhD. But reading through these differing accounts of his behaviour, female physicists are left wondering whether this great man of science would have seen them as colleagues and equals, or as prey.

I still find a lot in Feynman to look up to, as a physicist who did amazing work but cared about communication and didn’t give in to pressure to conform. However I can still acknowledge the women he mistreated, or perhaps even drove out of the field which is a terrible loss to science. He had a complexity to him, and my initial hero-worship of Feynman when I was younger has been replaced by equally complex feelings, of respect for his scientific and communication work alongside frustration at his mistreatment of women. But there’s no such thing as a perfect hero anyway, and if I needed one in physics, I might be waiting a long time. We have many historical women in physics to look up to, like Lise Meitner or Emmy Noether, and yet often these women were denied resources and opportunities that their male colleagues had, which can make them feel like amazing but also tragic figures. I would hope that women working in science today can be heroic without the tragedy.

Perhaps looking for heroes in science is a fundamentally flawed endeavor. Science is at its heart collaborative, and the sheer scope of human knowledge means that it is impossible for one person, toiling alone, to conquer it all. We must talk to each other, work together, and build on existing work, as famously stated by Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The great man theory is as flawed when it comes to science as it is when it comes to history. We all seek out role models, but we must recognize that they worked with others, seen and unseen, and that science is a societal effort and not the work of a lone genius.

While Feynman is long gone, there are other scientists still living, still contributing, and still behaving badly. It’s important that we not let them off the hook. Feynman lived decades ago, and certainly the standards of behaviour were different then, but today’s harassers and discriminators have no such excuse. If science is truly a collaborative effort, then it loses strength every time a person is pushed out of science by harassment. We can have complicated feelings about prominent scientists of the past, but there are a lot of people working in science today who are doing it right, and can serve as inspirations.

For example, tomorrow is the first ever LGBT STEM day, being celebrated with events around the world. Our Irish LGBT STEM network, House of STEM, has done so much to organise and promote this event, and founder Shaun O’Boyle explains why it’s desperately needed here:

The past is full of problematic yet successful scientists. Yet I’m hopeful that the future will have a broader array of amazing scientists, working together, who are also amazing people.

Comedy is a tool for change. It changes how people think about the world we live in, about complex ideas, and about each other. In this talk from TEDxTUM this winter, I explain why comedy is a great way to communicate science, to foster new ways of thinking, and even to show our humanity during the toughest times.

I’m very proud of this talk and I hope you enjoy it. It’s dedicated to my father.

As discussed in previous articles, the idea of science communication is nothing new. And yet there is still resistance from certain quarters to the idea that communicating science research to the public ought to be as high a priority as the research itself. So how do you counter that, or better yet, enact a lasting change in the resistant areas?

One idea getting attention is that of the ‘flipped academic‘ – that is, someone in academia who focuses on public engagement and communication first and traditional markers of academic success – such as publishing papers – second. The flipped academic endeavours to maximise the impact of their work, ensures their work addresses specific problems rather than theoretical ones, and rearranges traditional teaching structures into something more effective and engaging for their students. While this may be easier for academics in some fields than others it’s still a robust blueprint for any school wanting to update their outputs to embrace.

Another necessary requirement for any meaningful change is research into the effectiveness of science communication and outreach. Asking scientists and academics to adopt a wholly new and sometimes vastly different way of working cannot come without proof that it’s worth doing, and right now proof is surprisingly thin on the ground. STEM researchers need to link up with social scientists to document and analyse the impact different outreach activities has on things like public opinion so that there’s a concrete reason to be pursuing it. Most grants in the UK seem to be good at requesting evaluation as part of the funding requirements, but science communicators should go one further and publicise these evaluations, and expand on them.

Though to argue against the existence of specifically-trained science communicators would be to put myself out of a job, now is also the time to instill the importance of public engagement in the ‘next’ generation of researchers and academics – though that isn’t to say currently-existing researchers can’t get on the bandwagon. But students are in an excellent position to build up a skillset that includes the ability to both do good research and good communication about said research. I would be thrilled to see universities moving towards offering science communication courses for undergraduates and for postgraduates and doctoral students to be allowed to specialise in public engagement – a benefit for both the researcher and the institute they represent.

Lastly, more support for public engagement from governing bodies would go a long way towards convincing universities of its growing importance and therefore incentivising them to value it more highly. This is a bit of a chicken-egg scenario, as more people doing good science communication and researching its effects would make it much easier for it to gain public support, so ideally these things would all grow together until there’s a well-balanced network of monetary support, good data, and well-trained professionals engaged in it. I do think we’ll get there one day, but with all the exciting research and discovery going on in the world today, the sooner the better.